Third Take

Cakewalk dropped the bomb today.

Already feature packed, SONAR 7 Producer Edition tips the scales with: integrated Step Sequencer view; Smart MIDI Tools; dozens of MIDI workflow and editing enhancements; Roland® V-Vocal™ 1.5 editor enhanced with pitch to MIDI conversion; new instruments: Z3TA+ 1.5, Dimension LE with Garritan Pocket Orchestra, Rapture LE, & DropZone providing over 1000 new sounds; LP-64 EQ and LP-64 Multiband linear phase mastering VSTs; Boost 11 Peak Limiter; internal sidechaining for SONAR’s dynamics processors & multi-input capable VSTs; mix with external hardware and instruments with automatic delay compensation; Dim Solo Mode; shortcuts for audio I/O & bus assignments; integrated audio CD ripping & burning; and Cakewalk Publisher 2.0 for uploading and presenting music online.

There are a lot of things to be excited about there! The mastering plugs could be very nice, the side-chaining is a great (and long overdue) enhancement, and the automatic delay compensation for mixing with external hardware is fantastic for anyone with old outboard gear.

I don’t use a lot of softsynths, but it sounds like they’re packing in some serious instruments with the addition of Z3TA+, Rapture LE, Pocket Orchestra, etc. The MIDI editing features look impressive as well.

The “Cakewalk Publisher” sounded lame at first, but reading the details changed my mind:

Cakewalk Publisher 2.0 — Integrated Cakewalk Publisher presents an innovative new tool to publish and present music online. Cakewalk Publisher provides a fast and easy way to create a customized, online, streaming music player and playlists that can then be directly uploaded from SONAR to band websites, and hosted on MySpace and other Internet sites.

• Simply drag files into Publisher to quickly create playlists
• Build custom Flash-based audio players with choice of colors, size, layout, etc to match web designs
• Support for album art: choose an image and URL for each song in your playlist
• Includes FTP client to upload music and players directly to your website
• XML generation to embed customized players on many websites (Myspace, etc.)

If it can actually generate custom flash players, ready to upload to a band website, that is going to be huge. I have actually considered buying Flash and learning how to program ActionScript just so I could make my own player that didn’t look so generic.

I want to finish a few projects on my stable 6.2.1 install before I do any upgrading, but it looks like there are many good things to look forward to.

UPDATE: There’s also a little video about the new features.